Evaporating Borders and Fortress Europe
It requires work, everything does. How can we call ourselves civilised when 22,000 bodies have sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean in the last 14 years?
27 Oct 2014
Iva Radivojevic moved from Belgrade to Cyprus at the age of 12 during the war in ex-Yugoslavia, with her mother and sister. Through hard work her mother saved enough money for her to leave Cyprus for New York aged 18, where she found that filmmaking was the work she loved. Her first full-length documentary has just won the prize for Best Investigative Film at the Doc Lisboa Festival in Portugal.
Evaporating Borders films the lives of a variety of immigrants, who make up 25% of the population of Cyprus, including Iraquis, Phillipinos, Bangladeshis, Syrians and Lebanese. It also faces the conflicting attitudes, showing demonstrations by far-right anti-immigrant groups, and talking to an immigrant who believes that many others arrive on the island with no intention of finding work but just living on EU benefits. In fact, many of the immigrants are stateless, having arrived without documents in the Turkish enclave and crossed the Green Line to enter the EU. Typically, a middle eastern migrant may have paid 3000 dollars to reach the island and another 1000 to be taken over the Green Line.
Just this week the British Foreign Office has announced it will no longer support search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean “because it encourages others to attempt the crossing.
The film was shown at DocLisboa film festival in Lisbon in 2014 and the trailer can be viewed here: https://mubi.com/pt/pt/films/evaporating-borders
And the whole film is available if you subscribe here: https://dafilms.com/film/11040-evaporating-borders
This interview was published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper www.theprisma.co.uk in 2014, but is one of those that were lost after a hacking attack. I am publishing it here in full until the original with photos can be recovered. And since it is as relevant today as it was in 2014, I have given it today’s date. The brutality in Gaza is now even worse, as the apartheid Zionist regime is supported by successive US presidents.
Was making this film a way to explore your own beliefs in a new multicultural situation?
The film definitely stemmed from my experience as a young immigrant in Cyprus. My experience was completely different from those of the people in the film, but we share the sense of uprootedness, not belonging and vulnerability. As I was returning from time to time to visit my family still on the island, I noticed a big shift in the attitudes toward these new migrants and I wanted to talk about it.
Your family left Belgrade a year after the Croatian war began what effect did this have on your attitudes to nationality and identity?
We left a country called Yugoslavia and I still refer to myself as a Yugoslavian because I have no experience of anything else. My mother is Croatian and my father Serbian, which further complicates things. When the war broke out, my mother, sister and I moved to Cyprus, a divided island and another place that was dealing with an "identity crisis".
Very early I understood the need for a sort of "fluid" identity. I was always reminded of my "nationality" because I lived in a foreign land but my personal ties with it loosened until I lost the feeling of belonging anywhere. Now I say that I have multiple "homes" and I belong everywhere.
Longing for home is one feeling shared by many migrants, but they often come from countries which do not experience mass immigration, so presumably what is familiar to them would be a world without immigrants. Do you have any sympathy for the Cypriots who felt their culture being eroded "by people without guns" ?
Migration has always been a part of humanity, but we’ve come to perceive migrants as criminals. We live in a multicultural world. Cyprus experienced an economic boom 20 years ago and it was largely due to migrant workers who played a huge part in enabling Cypriots to enjoy a better life. But it’s also a mistake to view migrants as merely instruments of economic growth and deny their humanity. People will move wherever they can in search for a better life, it should be a right not a crime.
Instead, we construct institutions embedded with nationalist dogma which branch out from government to educational bodies and marginalize those that don’t fit the mould.
Culture doesn’t flourish in isolation. And we mustn't forget that about 80% of current refugees are being hosted by developing countries not the West. The number of registered refugees in Lebanon is 1 million, Cyprus has granted refugee status to a total of about 1000 asylum seekers in the past decade.
How did people react to the film in Cyprus ?
When you watch yourself on screen you have a strong emotional reaction, but it was positive enough though there is still a degree of denial. We are looking to organize more screenings and create discussions. And we're also arranging to have the film shown in University and educational settings.
The poet's name is Ghassan Saadon and the poem is Sea sickness
Beyond this vast sea
I left and never looked back
at the wreck that was implemented in my soul
by the hands of that sad lullaby that we call "home"
therefore when the sorrow washes my heart with salty tears,
I can see inside me
the piles of disappointment
sleeping soundly
we will never recover from this sea sickness,
no matter where we land.
And we will always vomit our dreams, our memories,
and the faces of those we left behind
until we spit the last piece of home
and die.
You acknowledge that your background made migration a positive experience - what do ordinary poor migrants need to survive in a hostile world?
Every situation is very different. We had some money when we went to Cyprus but it quickly ran out. My mother was a single parent of two teenage girls in a foreign country. She worked 7 days a week and we hardly ever saw her. By the time I finished high school, we gathered whatever money we could to send me to college in NY, knowing that once I got there I would be on my own. I'd need to find a job and figure out how to put myself through school. It meant that, like my mum, I would work 7 days a week at night and go to school during the day. She had to deal with her kids being thousands of miles away from the age of 18.
It's not easy, and there are side effects. There was no option of going back to Yugoslavia, and once I left I had no papers to stay in Cyprus, so I had to make something happen in NY.
Ultimately, the hard work bears fruit and I'm very lucky that today I can live in a place I love, work and sustain myself doing what I love. I've been lucky - lucky that I have the "right" skin tone, the "right" religious background. For refugees this may mean creating organizations and fighting for their rights collectively. The Kurdish migrants in Cyprus have been more successful at this, and the Philippine community has created a strong bond. It requires work, everything does.
Is there an alternative to 'fortress europe?
That involves other questions. The recent wars are a direct result of colonization and the policies of the West and NATO. And now we’ve locked off our territory and anyone wishing to enter has to be wealthy, healthy, educated and preferably white and Christian.
How can we call ourselves civilized when over 22,000 bodies in the past 14 years have sank to the bottom of our seas? (3000 in the last year alone). When we allow Israel to launch an extended offensive and mass killing in Gaza, we are literally sending 500 refugees to die at sea. This is not a natural catastrophe, these are our institutions. The answer is not social cannibalism, attacking the most vulnerable
members of our societies.
There is no easy answer but one thought would be to construct policies that are based on the good all of humanity not just within the constraints of specific borders.(Cypriots were once refugees and they could be again).
When you saw the 2 men in a doorway and felt suspicious, you looked again and saw something quite different. Do you think racism is a purely subjective prejudice?
It's a social construction, which includes subjective prejudice. One way to eliminate it, is to start from that subjective point of view. How do I participate in it? What is my role? What are my thoughts? How can I change them?
What is your next project ?
I’m in the process of finishing a short film that I shot in the Balkans. And I’m starting work on a feature length documentary called Aleph, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story by the same name.